3Dmusic UI design

Tools & Trade: Virtual Reality

Research Notes: Tilt Sensor

Accelerometer: Returns the measure of g-forces on the device with respect to the X, Y and Z axes(movement in space) Compass: Returns a heading with respect to North(look for the North) Gyrometer: Returns the measure of angular velocity with respect to the X, Y, and Z axes(Rotation) Inclinometer: Returns the pitch, roll, and yaw values that correspond to the rotation angles around the X, Y, and Z (Rotation angle, XYZ)

Betekenis

Een inclinometer (ook wel clinometer of hellingmeter genoemd) is een instrument waarmee met behulp van de zwaartekracht hoeken van hellingen gemeten kunnen worden. Inclinometers worden onder andere voor het meten van hellingen in de bouw, luchtvaart, scheepvaart en wegenbouw gebruikt. Indirekt kan er ook de hoogte van bijvoorbeeld een boom, mast, of een ander bouwwerk mee berekend worden.

Bij namen It is also known as a tilt meter, tilt indicator, slope alert, slope gauge, gradient meter, gradiometer, level gauge, level meter, declinometer, and pitch & roll indicator.

tilt meter, tilt indicator, slope alert, slope gauge, gradient meter, gradiometer, level gauge, level meter, declinometer, and pitch & roll indicator.

Geschiedenis

Inclinometers omvatten voorbeelden zoals Well in-clinometer, de essentiële delen waarvan een vlakke kant, of basis, waarop hij staat, en een holle schijf slechts de helft gevuld met een aantal zware vloeistof.

Het glazen oppervlak van de schijf wordt omgeven door een schaalverdeling die de hoek waarbij de oppervlakte van de vloeistof bevindt, onder verwijzing naar de vlakke basis markeert. De nullijn evenwijdig aan de basis, en wanneer de vloeistof staat op die lijn, de platte kant horizontaal; het 90 graden loodrecht op de basis, en wanneer de vloeistof staat op die lijn, de platte kant loodrecht of loodrecht. Tussenliggende hoeken zijn gemarkeerd, en, met behulp van eenvoudige conversie tabellen, het instrument geeft het tempo van de daling per ingestelde afstand van de horizontale meting, en stel de afstand van de schuine lijn.

Topographic Abney level

De Abney niveau is een handheld meetinstrument ontwikkeld in de jaren 1870, dat een waarneming buis en inclinometer, zo opgesteld dat de landmeter de waarneming buis (en de crosshair) kan af te stemmen met de reflectie van de luchtbel in de waterpas van de inclinometer wanneer het omvat lijn van het zicht is op de op de inclinometer hoek.

Analoog Tilt - Tuturial

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Een van de meer bekende hellingsmeter installaties was op het achterpaneel van de Ryan NYP "The Spirit of St. Louis" - in 1927 Charles Lindbergh koos de lichtgewicht Rieker Inc P-1057 Degree Inclinometer om hem te klimmen en afdaling hoek informatie.

Sensortechnologie

Tilt sensoren en inclinometers genereren van een kunstmatige horizon en meet hoekige tilt met betrekking tot deze horizon. Ze worden gebruikt in camera's, vliegtuigen vlucht controles, auto beveiligingssystemen, en speciale schakelaars en worden ook gebruikt voor het platform egaliseren, giek hoek indicatie en in andere toepassingen waarbij het meten van tilt.

camera's, vliegtuigen vlucht controles, auto beveiligingssystemen, boten, PlayStation 3 en Wii game controllers & Segway Transporters

Belangrijke specificaties te overwegen bij het zoeken naar tilt sensoren en inclinometers zijn de hellingshoek assortiment en het aantal assen (die meestal, maar niet altijd, orthogonale). De hellingshoek bereik is het bereik van de gewenste lineaire uitgang. Voorkomende implementaties van tilt sensoren en hellingmeters zijn accelerometer, Liquid Capacitieve, elektrolytische, gasbel in vloeibare en slinger. Tilt sensor technologie is ook geïmplementeerd in video games. Yoshi's Universal Gravitation en Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble zijn beide opgebouwd rond een tilt sensor mechanisme, dat is ingebouwd in de cartridge. De PlayStation 3 en Wii game controllers gebruiken ook kantelen als een middel om videospellen te spelen. Inclinometers worden ook gebruikt in de civiele techniek, bijvoorbeeld de helling van de grond te bouwen op maat.

How Electrolytic Tilt Sensors Work Figure 1 shows one axis of a fluid-filled sensor tipped at ~15°. As the sensor tilts, the surface of the fluid remains level due to gravity. The fluid is electrically conductive, and the conductivity between the two electrodes is proportional to the length of electrode immersed in the fluid. At the angle shown, for example, the conductivity between pins a and b would be greater than that between b and c. Electrically, the sensor is similar to a potentiometer, with resistance changing in proportion to tilt angle.

Hoe elektrolytische Tilt Sensors Work Figuur 1 toont een as van een met vloeistof gevulde sensor getipt bij ~ 15 °. Aangezien de sensor kantelt, het oppervlak van de vloeistof blijft horizontaal gevolg van de zwaartekracht. De vloeistof is elektrisch geleidend, en het geleidingsvermogen tussen de twee elektroden is evenredig met de lengte van de elektrode ondergedompeld in de vloeistof. Op de figuur wordt weergegeven, bijvoorbeeld de geleidbaarheid tussen pinnen a en b groter zou zijn dan die tussen b en c zijn. Elektrisch, de sensor is vergelijkbaar met een potentiometer, weerstand verandert evenredig met hoek kantelen.

4-Directional Tilt Sensor Item code: 28036

What It Can Do

- Measures rotatation position in four directions - Basic tilt sensing when accelerometer is not required - Easy interface with two digital on/off outputs

The 4-Directional Tilt Sensor indicates rotational position. Two digital (on/off) outputs indicate which side of the sensor is pointing down: the top, bottom, left, or right. The tilt sensor is an economical alternative to more expensive accelerometers, when precise angular feedback isn’t necessary. The sensor provides two independent outputs, labeled Out 1 and Out 2, which together indicate which side of the device (top, bottom, left, right) is facing the ground. Inside the 4-Directional Tilt Sensor is a small captive ball that alternately blocks or allows light to strike a pair of photodetectors. Because this ball is sensitive to both gravity and very fast motion, the tilt sensor is best when attached to stationary or slower-moving objects.

Source: [[2]]

waterpas 2.1.2 APK for Android

Research Notes: Accelerometer

Moving the housing the Seismic Mass stretches calculates the force of gravity (G-force)

3 accelerometer on the Axis, can calculate the rotation of the device

Smartphone accelerometer

Seismic Mass that can move

If if the center cation (Seismic Mass) moves, current will flow. Engineers correlate the amount of flowing current to acceleration

1/50th of an inch MEMS Micro Electro - Mechanical Systems

formula Newton's second law of motion relates force, mass, and acceleration through this very simple equation:

Force = mass x acceleration or... F = m a or... a = F / m

Use - Wii controllers - Smartphone - Jump Rope - Running - Camera: built-in accelerometer to trigger the shutter when it detects the camera being stable. - Text reader app: incorporating some form of scrolling.

Iphone apps using accelerometer Source: http://www.creativeapplications.net/i-os/10-creative-ways-to-use-the-accelerometer-iphone/

- Creating Depth

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- Rocketships: Accelerometers are the stuff of rocket science—quite literally! Mounted in spacecraft, they're a handy way to measure not just changes in rocket speed but also apogee (when a craft is at its maximum distance from Earth - airplane and ship autopilots. - Car Airbags - heating appliances, such as electronic irons and fan heaters, have accelerometers inside that detect when they fall over and switch them off to stop them causing fires? - SEISMOLOGISCH ONDERZOEK VAN DE NEDERLANDSE BODEM

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Research Notes: Donald Norman

- Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself.

- Why? Because we are all designers in the sense that all of us deliberately design our lives, our rooms, and the way we do things

- To understand products, it is not enough to understand design or technology: it is critical to understand business.

- The one thing I can predict with certainty is that the principles of human psychology will remain the same, which means that the design principles here, based on psychology, on the nature of human cognition, emotion, action, and interaction with the world, will remain unchanged.

- book Living with Complexity. The first edition had a focus upon affordances, but although affordances

- make sense for interaction with physical objects, they are confusing when dealing with virtual ones

- book The Design of Future Things) and what I consider the best new approach to deal with design so as to either eliminate or minimize human error: resilience engineering.

- “You have trouble opening doors?” Yes. I push doors that are meant to be pulled, pull doors that should be pushed, and walk into doors that neither pull nor push, but slide.

- books Catalogue d’objets introuvables (Catalog of unfindable objects) provides delightful examples of everyday things that are deliberately unwork- able, outrageous, or otherwise ill-formed.

- The design of the door should indicate how to work it without any need for signs, certainly without any need for trial and error.

- Two of the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding. Discoverability: Is it possible to even figure out what actions are possible and where and how to per- form them?

- Whether the device is a door or a stove, a mobile phone or a nuclear power plant, the relevant components must be visible, and they must communicate the correct message: What actions are possible?

- With complex devices, discoverability and understanding require the aid of manuals or personal instruction. We accept this if the device is indeed complex, but it should be unnecessary for simple things. Many products defy understanding simply because they have too many functions and controls.

- All artificial things are designed. Whether it is the layout of furniture in a room, the paths through a garden or forest, or the intricacies of an electronic device, some person or group of people had to decide upon the layout, operation, and mechanisms.

- But even though people have designed things since prehistoric times, the field of design is relatively new, divided into many areas of specialty.

- In the best of cases, the products should also be delightful and enjoyable, which means that not only must the requirements of engineering, manufacturing, and ergonomics be sat- isfied, but attention must be paid to the entire experience, which means the aesthetics of form and the quality of interaction.

- Industrial design: The professional service of creating and developing concepts and specifications that optimize the function, value, and appearance of products and systems for the mutual benefit of both user and manufacturer (from the Industrial Design Society of America’s website).

- Interaction design: The focus is upon how people interact with technology. The goal is to enhance people’s understanding of what can be done, what is happening, and what has just occurred. Interaction design draws upon principles of psychology, design, art, and emotion to ensure a positive, enjoyable experience.

- Experience design: The practice of designing products, processes, services, events, and environments with a focus placed on the quality and enjoyment of the total experience.

- When done badly, the products are unusable, leading to great frustration and irritation. Or they might be usable, but force us to behave the way the product wishes rather than as we wish.

- By human standards, machines are pretty limited. They do not maintain the same kind of rich history of experiences that people have in common with one another, experiences that enable us to interact with others because of this shared understanding. Instead, machines usually follow rather simple, rigid rules of be- havior. If we get the rules wrong even slightly, the machine does what it is told, no matter how insensible and illogical.

- People are imaginative and creative, filled with common sense; that is, a lot of valuable knowledge built up over years of experience. But instead of capitalizing on these strengths, machines require us to be precise and accurate, things we are not very good at.

- It is the duty of machines and those who design them to understand people. It is not our duty to understand the arbitrary, meaningless dictates of machines.

- Some come from the limitations of today’s technology. Some come from self-imposed restrictions by the designers, often to hold down cost. But most of the problems come from a complete lack of understanding of the design principles necessary for effective human-machine interaction.

- But most of the problems come from a complete lack of understanding of the design principles necessary for effective human-machine interaction. Why this deficiency? Because much of the design is done by engineers who are experts in technology but limited in their understanding of people.

- Engineers, moreover, make the mistake of thinking that logical explanation is sufficient: “If only people would read the instructions,” they say, “everything would be all right.”

- When people have trouble, the engineers are upset, but often for the wrong reason. “What are these people doing?” they will wonder. “Why are they doing that?” The problem with the designs of most engineers is that they are too logical. We have to accept human behavior the way it is, not the way we would wish it to be.

- The moral was simple: we were designing things for people, so we needed to understand both technology and people. But that’s a difficult step for many engineers: machines are so logical, so orderly. If we didn’t have people, everything would work so much better. Yup, that’s how I used to think.

- Why are people having problems?” they wonder. “You are being too logical,” I say. “You are designing for people the way you would like them to be, not for the way they really are.”

- But even though much has improved, the rapid rate of technology change outpaces the advances in design. New technologies, new applications, and new methods of interaction are continually arising and evolving.

- The solution is human-centered design (HCD), an approach that puts human needs, capabilities, and behavior first, then designs to accommodate those needs, capabilities, and ways of behaving. Good design starts with an understanding of psychology and technology. Good design requires good communication, especially from machine to person, indicating what actions are possible, what is happening, and what is about to happen. Communication is especially important when things go wrong.

- Human-centered design is a design philosophy. It means starting with a good understanding of people and the needs that the design is intended to meet. This understanding comes about primarily through observation, for people themselves are often unaware of their true needs, even unaware of the difficulties they are encountering. Getting the specification of the thing to be defined is one of the most difficult parts of the design, so much so that the HCD principle is to avoid specifying the problem as long as possible but instead to iterate upon repeated approximations. This is done through rapid tests of ideas, and after each test modifying the approach and the problem definition. The results can be products that truly meet the needs of people.

- Great designers produce pleasurable experiences. Experience: note the word. Engineers tend not to like it; it is too subjective. But when I ask them about their favorite automobile or test equipment, they will smile delightedly as they discuss the fit and finish, the sensa- tion of power during acceleration, their ease of control while shift- ing or steering, or the wonderful feel of the knobs and switches on the instrument.

- Was the overall experience positive, or was it frustrating and confusing? When our home technology behaves in an uninterpretable fashion we can become confused, frustrated, and even angry—all strong negative emotions.

- Discoverability results from appropriate application of five fundamental psychological concepts covered in the next few chapters: affordances, signifiers, constraints, mappings, and feedback. But there is a sixth principle, perhaps most important of all: the conceptual model of the system.

- Many of the new objects are similar to ones we already

- know, but many are unique, yet we manage quite well. How do we do this? Why is it that when we encounter many unusual natural objects, we know how to interact with them? Why is this true with many of the artificial, human-made objects we encounter? The an- swer lies with a few basic principles.

- The term affordance refers to the relationship between a physical object and a person (or for that matter

- Glass affords transparency. At the same time, its physical struc- ture blocks the passage of most physical objects. As a result, glass affords seeing through and support, but not the passage of air or most physical objects (atomic particles can pass through glass).

- The reason we like glass is its relative invis- ibility, but this aspect, so useful in the normal window, also hides its anti-affordance property of blocking passage. As a result, birds often try to fly through windows. And every year, numerous peo- ple injure themselves when they walk (or run) through closed glass

- J. J. Gibson, an eminent psychologist who provided many advances to our understanding of human perception.

- Gibsonian psychology, an ecological approach to percep- tion.

- When I pondered my question—how do people know how to act when confronted with a novel situation—I realized that a large part of the answer lay in Gibson’s work. He pointed out that all the senses work together, that we pick up information about the world by the combined result of all of them. “Information pickup” was one of his favorite phrases, and Gibson believed that the combined information picked up by all of our sensory apparatus—sight, sound, smell, touch, balance, kinesthetic, acceleration, body position— determines our perceptions without the need for internal pro- cessing or cognition.

- Balls are for throwing or bouncing. Perceived affordances help people figure out what actions are possible with- out the need for labels or instructions.

- Many people find affordances difficult to understand because they are relationships, not properties.

- They soon discovered that when working with the graphical designs for electronic displays, they needed a way to designate which parts could be touched, slid upward, downward, or sideways, or tapped upon. The actions could be done with a mouse, stylus, or fingers. Some systems responded to body motions, gestures, and spoken words, with no touching of any physical device.

- There was no word that fit, so they took the closest existing word—affordance. Soon designers were saying such things as, “I put an affordance there,” to describe why they displayed a circle on a screen to indicate where the person should touch, whether by mouse or by finger. “No,” I said, “that is not an affordance. That is a way of communicating where the touch should be.

- affordance of touching exists on the entire screen: you are trying to signify where the touch should take place. That’s not the same thing as saying what action is possible.”

- People search for clues, for any sign that might help them cope and understand.

- The term signifier has had a long and illustrious career in the exotic field of semiotics, the study of signs and symbols.

- Semiotics meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics

- Some natural mappings are cultural or biological, as in the universal standard that moving the hand up signifies more, moving it down signifies less,

- Other natural mappings follow from the principles of perception and allow for the natural grouping or patterning of controls and feedback.

- Note that there are many mappings that feel “natural” but in fact are specific to a particular culture: what is natural for one culture is not necessarily natural for another.

- The principles are simple but rarely incorporated into design. Good design takes care, planning, thought, and an understanding of how people behave.

- Poor feedback can be worse than no feedback at all, because it is distracting, uninformative, and in many cases irritating and anxiety-provoking.

- Feedback

- Too much feedback can be even more annoying than too little. My dishwasher likes to beep at three a.m. to tell me that the wash is done, defeating my goal of having it work in the middle of the night so as not to disturb anyone

- Feedback is essential, but not when it gets in the way of other things, including a calm and relaxing environment.

- Poor design of feedback can be the result of decisions aimed at reducing costs, even if they make life more difficult for people. Rather than use multiple signal lights, informative displays, or rich, musical sounds with varying patterns, the focus upon cost reduction forces the design to use a single light or sound to convey multiple types of information

- Just as with the lights, the only way to signal different states of the machine is by beeping different patterns. What do all these different patterns mean? How can we possibly learn and remember them?

- Feedback has to be planned. All actions need to be confirmed, but in a manner that is unobtrusive. Feedback must also be prior- itized, so that unimportant information is presented in an unob- trusive fashion, but important signals are presented in a way that does capture attention.

- Technology offers the potential to make life easier and more enjoyable; each new technology provides increased benefits.

- The obvious solution is to use exotic gestures or spoken commands, but how will we learn, and then remember, them?

- This leads the discussion to the role of understanding (via a conceptual model) and of emotions: pleasure when things work smoothly and frustration when our plans are thwarted.

- The gulfs are present for many devices. Interestingly, many peo- ple do experience difficulties, but explain them away by blaming themselves.

- The specific actions bridge the gap between what we would like to have done (our goals) and all possible physical actions to achieve those goals. After we specify what actions to make, we must actually do them—the stages of execution. There are three stages of execution that follow from the goal: plan, specify, and perform (the left side of Figure 2.2). Evaluating what happened has three stages: first, perceiving what happened in the world; second, trying to make sense of it (interpreting it); and, finally, comparing what happened with what was wanted (the right side of Figure 2.2).

- There we have it. Seven stages of action: one for goals, three for execution, and three for evaluation (Figure 2.2).

- 1. Goal (form the goal)

- 2. Plan (the action)

- 3. Specify (an action sequence)

- 4. Perform (the action sequence)

- 5. Perceive (the state of the world)

- 6. Interpret (the perception)

- 7. Compare (the outcome with the goal)

- Not all of the activity in the stages is conscious.

- It is only when we come across something new or reach some impasse, some problem that disrupts the normal flow of activity, that conscious attention is required.

- The action cycle can start from the top, by establishing a new goal, in which case we call it goal-driven behavior. In this situ ation, the cycle starts with the goal and then goes through the three stages of execution.

- Why do we need to know about the human mind? Because things are designed to be used by people, and without a deep understanding of people, the designs are apt to be faulty, difficult to use, difficult to understand.

- The mind is more difficult to comprehend than actions. Most of us start by believing we already understand both human behavior and the human mind. After all, we are all human: we have all lived with ourselves all of our lives, and we like to think we understand ourselves. But the truth is, we don’t. Most of human behavior is a result of subconscious processes. We are unaware of them. As a result, many of our beliefs about how people behave—including beliefs about ourselves—are wrong.

- The human mind is immensely complex, having evolved over a long period with many specialized structures.

- Riding a bicycle or driving a car. Singing. All of these skills take considerable time and practice to master, but once mastered, they are often done quite automatically.

- Because we are only aware of the reflective level of conscious processing, we tend to believe that all human thought is con- scious. But it isn’t. We also tend to believe that thought can be separated from emotion. This is also false. Cognition and emo- tion cannot be separated. Cognitive thoughts lead to emotions: emotions drive cognitive thoughts.

- Emotion is highly underrated. In fact, the emotional system is a powerful information processing system that works in tandem with cognition.

- Cognition attempts to make sense of the world: emotion assigns value. It is the emotional system that determines whether a situation is safe or threatening, whether something that is happening is good or bad, desirable or not. Cognition provides understanding: emotion provides value judgments.

- Subconscious thought matches patterns, finding the best possible match of one’s past experience to the current one. It proceeds rap- idly and automatically, without effort. Subconscious processing is one of our strengths.

- Conscious thought is quite different. It is slow and labored. Here is where we slowly ponder decisions, think through alter- natives, compare different choices.

- Conscious thought is quite different. It is slow and labored. Here is where we slowly ponder decisions, think through alter- natives, compare different choices.

- Conscious thought considers first this approach, then that—comparing, rationalizing, finding explanations. Formal logic, mathematics, decision theory: these are the tools of conscious thought. Both conscious and subconscious modes of thought are powerful and essential aspects of human life.

- Both can provide insightful leaps and creative moments. And both are subject to errors, misconceptions, and failures.

- A positive emotional state is ideal for creative thought, but it is not very well suited for getting things done. Too much, and we call the person scatterbrained, flitting from one topic to another, unable to finish one thought before another comes to mind. A brain in a negative emotional state provides focus: precisely what is needed to maintain attention on a task and finish it. Too much, however, and we get tunnel vision, where people are unable to look beyond their narrow point of view. - Both the positive, relaxed state and the anxious, negative, and tense state are valuable and powerful tools for human creativity and action. The extremes of both states, how- ever, can be dangerous.

- One valuable explanation of the lev- els of processing within the brain, applicable to both cognitive and emotional processing, is to think of three different levels of processing, each quite different from the other, but all working together in concert. Although this is a gross oversimplification of the actual processing, it is a good enough approximation to provide guidance in understanding human behavior. The approach I use here comes from my book Emotional Design.

- Three Levels of Processing: Visceral, Behavioral, and Reflective. Visceral and behavioral levels are subcon- scious and the home of basic emotions. The reflective level is where conscious thought and decision-making reside, as well as the highest level of emotions.

- Great designers use their aesthetic sensibilities to drive these visceral responses.

- For designers, the most critical aspect of the behavioral level is that every action is associated with an expectation.

- Expect a positive outcome and the result is a positive affective response (a “posi- tive valence,” in the scientific literature). Expect a negative outcome and the result is a negative affective response (a negative valence): dread and hope, anxiety and anticipation.

- To the designer, reflection is perhaps the most important of the levels of processing. Reflection is conscious, and the emotions produced at this level are the most protracted: those that assign agency and cause, such as guilt and blame or praise and pride. Re- flective responses are part of our memory of events. Memories last far longer than the immediate experience or the period of usage, which are the domains of the visceral and behavioral levels.

- All three levels of processing work together. All play essential roles in determining a person’s like or dislike of a product or ser- vice. One nasty experience with a service provider can spoil all future experiences.

- Designing at all three levels is so important that I devote an entire book to the topic, Emotional Design.

- In psychology, there has been a long debate about which hap- pens first: emotion or cognition. Do we run and flee because some event happened that made us afraid? Or are we afraid because our conscious, reflective mind notices that we are running?

- a state that the social scientist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has labeled “flow.” Csikszentmihalyi has long studied how people interact with their work and play, and how their lives reflect this intermix of activities. When in the flow state, people lose track of time and the outside environment.

- The flow state occurs when the challenge of the activity just slightly exceeds our skill level, so full attention is continually required.

- he vicious cycle starts: if you fail at something, you think it is your fault. Therefore you think you can’t do that task. As a result, next time you have to do the task, you believe you can’t, so you don’t even try. The result is that you can’t, just as you thought.

- You’re trapped in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

- To fail is to learn: we learn more from our failures than from our successes. With success, sure, we are pleased, but we often have no idea why we succeeded. With failure, it is often possible to figure out why, to ensure that it will never happen again.

- Failure can be such a powerful learning tool that many designers take pride in their failures that happen while a product is still in development.

- • Do not blame people when they fail to use your products properly. • Take people’s difficulties as signifiers of where the product can be

- improved.

- Eliminate all error messages from electronic or computer systems. Instead, provide help and guidance.

- Makeitpossibletocorrectproblemsdirectlyfromhelpandguidance messages. Allow people to continue with their task: Don’t impede progress—help make it smooth and continuous. Never make people start over.

- Assume that what people have done is partially correct, so if it is inappropriate, provide the guidance that allows them to correct the problem and be on their way.

- Think positively, for yourself and for the people you interact with. Today, we insist that people perform abnormally, to adapt themselves to the peculiar demands of machines, which includes always giving precise, accurate information. Humans are particularly bad at this, yet when they fail to meet the arbitrary, inhuman requirements of machines, we call it human error. No, it is design error. Designers should strive to minimize the chance of inappro- priate actions in the first place by using affordances, signifiers, good mapping, and constraints to guide the actions. If a person performs an inappropriate action, the design should maximize the chance that this can be discovered and then rectified.Our strengths are in our flexibility and creativity, in coming up with solutions to novel problems. We are creative and imaginative, not mechanical and precise.

- What do I want to accomplish?

- What are the alternative action sequences?

- What action can I do now?

- How do I do it?

- What happened?

- What does it mean?

- Is this okay? Have I accomplished my goal? Anyone using a product should always be able to determine the answers to all seven questions.

Reseach Notes: Virtual Reality Design Usability

immersive design learning to let go of the screen

These are my key takeaways from experimenting with VR at Instrument:

THINK LIKE HUMAN

We’ve moved from open grasslands where we could see danger or reward…to urban spaces where we rely on signs to inform ultimately to computers where we rely on GUI to communicate.

Each of these can be seen as an interaction model in its own right:

The Savannah

The oldest of interaction models. We can see everything, we are grounded. Content obeys the space. Objects in the present are close at hand. The future is on the horizon before us, the past is behind.

The Shop

Like the savannah, the shop implies a space that you can move around in but with a higher level of density. Content can be locked to the walls or planes inside of a space.

The Abstract The last 40 years have seen the rise of the digital landscape; a two dimensional plane that abstracts familiar real-world concepts like writing, using a calendar, storing documents in folders into user interface elements (UI). This approach allows for a high level of information density and multitasking. The down-side is that new interaction models need to be learned and there is a higher cognitive load to decision making.

Use perspective to your advantage Designers use size, contrast and color to denote hierarchy. These tools are still available in VR, but they are a little different. Size is based on the distance between the user and a piece of content.

Designers now have a full field of vision to play with, and humans are used to turning their heads or whole bodies.

Despite this, designers are trying to force 2D solutions into a 3D space, just like the Virtual Boy.

1 Flat: A common solution

The interface is skinned for the 3D space. It’s difficult to read text or images in perspective. There is no sense of grounding in the space. It’s a wall.

2 Curved: Marginally better

The content is curved around the user, so the tiles always face the user — making it much easier to read text or images.

3 Less content: Better

Less content is better, even if that requires some way to move through it.

4 Surrounded: Best

Hierarchy can be implied by nearness to the cone of focus. Secondary content can be pushed out of immediate view but still remain accessible.

Virtual Reality is immersive; design should support and enhance the user’s sense of presence in the virtual environment.

- Avoid rapid movement, it makes people sick.

- If there is a horizon line, keep it steady. A rolling horizon in VR is like a rolling horizon when you’re on a ship — not good.

- Avoid rapid or abrupt transitions to the world space, they are very disorientating.

- Do not require the user to move their head or body too much. Not only is this disorienting, but the user may be wearing their headset in an environment that they cannot turn around in, like on a plane.

- Be careful about mixing 2D GUI and 3D, the change can be jarring.

- Keep the density of information and objects on the screen low, much lower than in standard screen design. Not everything has to be in view. - Use real-world cues when appropriate.

- Bright scenes are fatiguing. (vermoeiend)

- When in doubt; test, test, test.

UI Design for VR (so far)

Tutorial Notes: Unreal Engine Blueprint

Blueprint Introduction -1-

What is blueprint (BP): Visual scripting, by connecting Notes

Types of BP:

- Level Blueprint (1 per Level) a.k.a LBP

- Class Blueprint (Multiple) a.k.a CBP

- C++ & Blueprint (Non visual scripting)

Turning On a Light -2-

- Create project: Starter content (stuff in de level) & choose a place to save your project

- New Level: File/New Level (Ctrl+N)

- Create Room: Content Browser/Starter Content/Architecture

- Create Light: Modes/Place/Lights/Point Light

- Turn Light on/off (manual): Select light/Details/Rendering/Visible

- Level Blueprint: Blueprint/Open Level Blueprint

- Import Object to LBP: Select the object/RMB in the EventGraph/Create a Reference to… (PointLight)

- Choose Actions from the object:

- Drag a line form the object note

- Actions taking a(n)…Reference, are all actions from the object (seen in the objects details panel)...

- Choose the action you want to effect...

- Point light on/off: Toggle Visibility

- Execute action start playing: 'Event BeginPlay' Note ~ 'Toggle Visibility’ Exec Input

- - 'Event beginplay note' will execute the action 'Toggle Visibility'

- ’Toggle Visibility’ its ’Target’ is the 'PointLight'

- So when start playing the ‘PointLight’ will turn on

- Simulate Notes: Alt+S

Toggling a Light with a Volume -3-

- Create Volume: Modes/Basic/Box Trigger

- Import Object Collision: This action is for when you enter the 'Box Trigger'

- - Select ‘Box Trigger’ (in the scene or the 'World Outliner’)

- LBP/RMB/Collision/Add On Actor Begin Overlap

- Note: Red notes are ‘Events Notes’ & Blue notes are 'Function Notes'

- Actived Light Visibility Entering the Box Trigger: ‘OnActorBeginOverlap (TriggerBox)’ ~ Execute 'Toggle Visibility'

- Actived Light Visibility Exit the Box Trigger:

- - Select Box Trigger

- LBP/RMB/Collision/Add On Actor End Overlap

- OnActorEndOverlap (TriggerBox) ~ Execute ’Toggle Visibility'

- Delay Action: LBP/RMB/Delay - - Place it between the ‘OnActorBeginOverlap’ ~ Delay ~ Toggle Visibility - Duration; Choose how many second its delayed

Creating a Class Blueprint (object(s) Blueprint)

- Setup Class BP: Content Browser/Content/RMB/Create Map/Name: Blueprint

- - Or, Select a object in the scene/Details Panel/Blueprint Add Script

- Create Class BP: RMB/Blueprint Class/Actor (BP for a Object) /Name (Light_BP)

- Quick Class BP overview:

- Components/Add Component: play object in de CPB

- Viewport: The object used for the BP

- Construction Script (advanced): used for variables

- Event Graph: Visual Scripting

- Add Component to the CBP

- Content Browser/content/props...

- Drag a Object in to the CBP/Components

- Make the Object 'Default Mesh': CBP/Components Panel/Drag object on the 'DefaultSceneRoot'

- Add a extra Comportment: components/Add Components/Choose Object (Spotlight)

- Add CBP in to the Scene: Drag it out of the Content Browser in to your scene

- Chance object Attributes: CBP/Select object/Details Panel

- Create CBP Box Collisionr: CBP/Add Component/Box Collision

- Ceate CBP Text: CBP/Add Component/Text Render (Note: Bug, replace CBP in the scene)

Adding Functionality to a Class Blueprint

1. Open the CBP Visual Editor: Content Browser/CBP (open)/EventGraph Tab

2. Import CBP object: Drag a object (sportlight) from the' Components Tab' into the 'EvertGraph'

- This note is called the 'get note'

- If you drag from the Component/'Variables tab' you can make a 'Set note':

- Set note is 'variable' you can replace later with a other note

3. Create object action:

    - Select Object )Component Tab)/Collision Box
    - Event Graph/Drag a line out of your object Note (Spotlight)/Add Event for TRIGGER/Add On Component Begin Overlap
    - Connect: OnComponentBeginOverlap (Trigger) ~ Execute (Toggle Visibility)

4. Afterwords make a 'OnComponentBeginOverlap (Trigger) ~ Execute (Toggle Visibility) 5. To make the script work the light must FIRST be switched of: CBP/Select Spotlight/Details Panel/Render/Viability OFF

CONCLUSION: with the Class Blueprint you can COPY the object with the same functions

Using Inputs to control a Class Blueprint In this example the Character can 'Toggle' the light (Reaction), within the Collision Box (Field of Action) by pressing the F-key (Action)

OnCompontentBeginOverlap (Trigger) activates when the character walks in the Collision box:

Enable Input is executed when:

It gets players input (Get player Controller)

The players input is controlled by the 'F-key'

The Light turns on (Toggle Visibility)

OnCompontenEndOverlap (Trigger) activates when the character walk in the Collision box:

Disable input is excited when:

The players input is controlled by the 'F-key'

The light turns off (Toggle Visibility)

Add Construction Script Customization

1. Setup: CBP/Construction Script

2. Place Object: CBP/Component panel/Drag object (Spotlight) in to the 'Construction Script'

3. Set Light Color: Object ~ 'Set Light Color note'

4. add a new Color: Set Light Color/New Light Color/RMB/Promote to Variable

- Rename Variable (Light Color) & Compile CBP

- Variable/Details Panel/Default Value/Choose a Color

5. Construction Script ~ Execute 'Set Light Color' note

6. Editable: Variable (Light Color)/Details/Editable ON

7. Tooltip: Variable (Light Color)/Details/Tooltip: Change Color of the Light

Experiment: Object Interaction

Object can be picked up, no matter how heavy they are

Link: [[5]]

Experiment: Interaction Teleportation

Instead of walking in the virtual world, you can teleport yourself

Link: [[6]]

Experiment: Interaction Gravity

Moving by changing Gravity Demo

Link: [[7]]

Note: I have not programmed demo

Research Notes: Apple Bad Design (Donald Norman)

- Once upon a time, Apple was known for designing easy-to-use, easy-to-understand products. - fundamental principles of good design: discoverability, feedback, recovery, and so on. Instead, Apple has, in striving for beauty - These principles, based on experimental science as well as common sense - Not because this was to be a gestural interface, but because Apple simultaneously made a radical move toward visual simplicity and elegance at the expense of learnability, usability, and productivity. - Do you swipe left or right, up or down, with one finger, two, or even as many as five? Do you swipe or tap, and if you tap is it a single tap or double? Is that text on the screen really text or is it a critically important button disguised as text? - It must follow the basic psychological principles that give rise to a feeling of understanding, of control, of pleasure. These include discoverability, feedback, proper mapping, appropriate use of constraints, and, of course, the power to undo one’s operations. - Yes, gesture-controlled devices, tablets, and phones have easier barriers to initial use.

DISCOVERABILITY

Discoverability, the ability to look at the system and immediately discover all the possible actions, was always a key component to the success of Apple designs. The principle was called "see and point" in the early days (and in Figure 1) because all possible actions were represented by objects such as buttons, icons, or menu list items that were visible to the user: See the action you want to do, point the mouse cursor at it, and one click delivered it. Simply put, discoverability means making actions discoverable—visible—so that they do not have to be memorized. The menus in the traditional desktop computers served this purpose well. Labeled icons do as well. Unlabeled icons most often fail, but the worst culprit of all is the complete lack of any cue. Note that discoverability no longer appears in the Apple Guidelines.

FEEDBACK

Feedback and its partner, feedforward, allow a person to know what happened after an action was done (feedback) or to understand what will happen if the action is selected (feedforward).

People depend on a steady stream of feedback to know how effective their actions have been. In the physical world, feedback is automatic. In the world of software, feedback occurs only if the designer has thought about it. Without feedback, people can be unsure of the current state: They will neither be in charge nor feel in charge.

RECOVERY

Errors happen. Recovery dictates it should be as easy or easier to undo than to do. (Called "forgiveness" in the guidelines and Figure 1, it too has disappeared from the current guidelines.) Recovery was implemented with the command "undo." Undo originated in 1974 at the (then) Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), probably by Warren Teitelman. The Apple Lisa and Macintosh, as is well known, derived their basic structures from the early development work at PARC (Apple purchased the rights from Xerox). The Undo command can itself be undone by means of "Redo." Undo and redo provide a powerful method both of recovering from errors but also of experimenting, trying things out, knowing that test operations can always be undone or redone.

Undo enables a user to recover content. Back is a companion command that enables a user to recover the user’s previous location in a navigational system. The original graphical user interfaces eliminated the user’s need to back up by eliminating navigation. Instead, documents and tools are brought to the user. Browsers and iOS are a throwback to the earlier navigational interfaces, where users wander about a labyrinth of passages leading to modal screens.

Browsers, in supporting the navigational system called the web, provide a Back button so users can move backward in their journey. IOS provides no such generalized tool, so that, for example, if you accidentally fire off a link from inside an app that takes you to Safari or YouTube or any one of many, many other places, there is no straightforward means of recovery. Back and Forward should be standard buttons in iOS so that the interface is forgiving of accidental navigation, instead of punitive.

CONSISTENCY

Most technology users have more than one device, yet the operations of the different devices often clash. Even within the same device, Apple has violated consistency: Rotate the iPhone, and keyboards change their layouts; rotate an iPad, and the home screen icons reorder themselves, with no simple way to predict where an icon will end up.

Consistency is still listed in the guidelines—but it is not followed. The Magic Mouse works differently than the track pad, which is different than gestures on the iPhone or tablet. Why? (Such inconsistencies can usually be traced to designers working away in isolation, never talking with one another. As Conway , the products of a company reflect the organizational structure of the company.)

ENCOURAGE GROWTH

Good design encourages people to learn and grow, taking on new and more complex tasks once they’ve learned the basics. Snapshot takers grow to become photographers, personal journal writers become bloggers, and children try programming and end up seeking careers in computer science. For decades, encouraging learning and growth was the life blood of Apple, a principle so important that it was universally internalized and understood.

Here are all 10 principles of good design:

- Innovative - Makes a product useful - Aesthetic - Makes a product understandable - Unobtrusive - Honest - Long-lasting - Thorough down to the last detail - Environmentally friendly - As little design as possible

Good user experience can only flow from a system where marketing, graphic and industrial design, engineering, and usability all work together in a collaborative effort to make life better, more enjoyable, and more productive for Apple’s customers.

Research Notes: Anthony Dunne

Good future design

- designing for how the world should be

- generating idea’s how it could be

- have a discusion or a debite

- realism > idealism

- speculative design

- idea’s and thoughts

- probable futures

- modeling different realitisch, or possible future scenarios

- play with: economisch- , athics- (filosofie), social-, cultural-realitisch & 'scientific realitisch (limit)'

- Preferable futures not what industrisch want, but what we want

- abstract research

- Start with a dream and the project becomes it self

- model alternative systems.

- Bolt thinking

- Expert Discussions: what to people think of you project from different fields?

- Tell world not stories

Wrong future design

- designing for how the world should be

- optemism and positie thinking

- klishee futures

- anarcho-evulutionists

- bio-liberals

- Marketplace have left little room for speculation on the cultural function of elec- tronic products.

- As ever more of our everyday social and cultural experiences are mediated by electronic products, designers need to develop ways of exploring how this electronic mediation might enrich people’s everyday lives.

- Hertzian Tales explores the way critical responses to the ideological nature of design1 can inform the development of aesthetic possibilities for electronic products.

- Looking beyond the quality of our relationship with objects themselves to the aesthetics of the social, psychological, and cultural experiences they mediate.

- Industrial design is not art, but neither is it purely a business tool. While mainstream industrial design is comfortable using its powerful visualization ca- pabilities to propagandize desires and needs designed by others, thereby main- taining a society of passive consumers, design research in the aesthetic and cultural realm should draw attention to how products limit our experiences and expose to criticism and discussion their hidden social and psychological mechanisms.

- I believe strongly in the potential of industrial design as applied art, or in- dustrial art, to improve the quality of our relationship to the artificial environment

- He suggests that the days of the design visionary are over, and a weariness with utopian visions has set in.

- visualize alternative future scenarios in ways that can be presented to the public, thus enabling democratic choices between the futures people actually want. Designers could then set about achieving these futures by developing new design strategies to direct industry to work with society.

- electronic technology on the way we experience and think about ourselves, objects, and environments.

- We are lacking a discipline, perhaps an ‘objectology,’ or an ‘object ethology,’ which allows us to analyse and systematise objects and to formulate the rules and codes of their behaviour .

- The best writing in this area blends anthropology, sociology, and semiology to explore the irrational dimensions of the material culture of everyday life.

- But generally, designers have not exploited the aesthetic dimension of new materials with the same energy that engineers have exploited their functional possibilities (to backlight LCD screens in laptop computers reducing their bulk and weight, e.g., or to illuminate escape routes in aircraft so they can be seen through smoke).

- For example, AT&T has applied for a patent for a coating of colored polymer sandwiched between two thin layers of indium tin oxide that changes color when a low voltage is fed through it; the company plans to use it to enable phones to change color instead of ringing.

- Dematerialization, therefore, means different things depending on what it is defined in relation to: immaterial/material, invisible/visible, energy/matter, software/hardware, virtual/real. But the physical can never be completely dis- missed: “Every symphony has its compact disc; every audio experience its loud- speaker; every visual image its camera and video disc

- The most difficult challenges for designers of electronic objects now lie not in technical and semiotic functionality, where optimal levels of performance are already attainable, but in the realms of metaphysics, poetry, and aesthetics, where little research has been carried out:

- The rich find their exclusivity continuously under threat. . . .

- Beyond a certain, relatively low price (low compared with other times in history) the rich cannot buy a better camera, home computer, tea kettle, television or video recorder than you or I. What they can do, and what sophisticated retailers do, is add unnecessary “stuff” to the object. You can have your camera gold plated. (Dormer 1990, 124)

- In a world where practicality and functionality can be taken for granted, the aesthetics of the post-optimal object could provide new experiences of everyday life, new poetic dimensions.

- Am I a man or a machine? There is no ambiguity in the traditional relationship between man and machine: the worker is always, in a way, a stranger to the machine he operates, and alienated by it. But at least he retains the precious status of alienated man. The new technologies, with their new machines, new images and interactive screens, do not alien- ate me. Rather, they form an integrated circuit with me. J. Baudrillard, “Xerox and Infinity”

- In design, the main aim of interactivity has become user-friendliness. Although this ideal is accepted in the workplace as improving productivity and efficiency, its main assumption, that the way to humanize technology is to close the gap between people and machines by designing “transparent” interfaces, is prob- lematic, particularly as this view of interactivity has spread to less utilitarian areas of our lives.

- According to Virilio (1995): “‘Interactive user-friendliness’ . . . is just a metaphor for the subtle enslavement of the human being to ‘intelligent’

- For instance, camcorders have many built-in features that encourage generic usage; a warning light flashes whenever there is a risk of “spoiling” a picture, as if to remind the user that he or she is about to become creative and should immediately return to the norm.

- It is the design of the interface which will de- cide whether the machinic phylum will cross between man and machines, whether humans and computers will enter into a symbiotic relationship, or whether humans will be replaced by machines.

- Paradoxically, user-centredness is not just figuring out how people map things, it absolutely requires recognising that the artefacts people interact with have enormous impact on how we think

- an aesthetic approach might subsume and subvert the idea of user-friendliness and provide an alternative model of interactivity.

- Figure 2.2 Marco Zanuso and Richard Sapper’s television for Brion Vega was a sophisticated expression of a new role for the skin of an object, with very different characteristics in both its states. Switching it on or off transformed it from familiar to mysterious object. The image of the black box became the starting point for exploring new languages of representation rather than interactivity.

- As a group these works are impressively diverse, original, and fresh. They imply no clear manifesto or philosophy, but rather reflect the individual personalities and interests of the designers.

- During the 1980s “product semantics” began to influence thinking about elec- tronic products. Semantics and semiotics were originally used by linguists to understand the structure of language and how it conveys meaning,

Transparency

- Because the mimetic approach has greatly affected mainstream thinking about electronic objects, most designs for interfaces with electronic products draw on familiar images and clichés rather than stretching design language. Nothing is what it appears, but simply an allusion to something we are already familiar with. Designers using existing codes and conventions to make new products more familiar often unconsciously reproduce aspects of the ideology encoded in their borrowed motifs.

- Figure 2.8 Peter Stathis’s Satori TV (1988), which turns its head to face the viewer when touched, suggests a life where our only company will be the electronic appliances of the home, which must supply the missing banalities of everyday human contact.

Aliens

- A range of possibility exists between ideas of the “pet” and the “alien.” While the pet offers familiarity, affection, submission, and intimacy, the alien is the pet’s opposite, misunderstood, and ostracized.

- Figure 2.9 Alan Rath’s C-Clamp (1992) literally gives technology a face, but not in a comfort- ing way. His faces are juxtaposed and recombined with other body and machine parts to create strange and sinister hybrids of people and machines.

Defamiliarization

- The poetic can offer more than simply enriched involvement. It can provide a complex experience, critical and subversive.

- According to Viktor Shklovsky, the movement’s best-known exponent, the function of poetic art is to counter- act the familiarization encouraged by routine modes of perception. We readily cease to “see” the world we live in, and become anaesthetized to its distinctive features.

Research Notes: Douglas Rushkoff

singularity

Computers are getting better at everything self loading antihuman (zombie appoalosy)

technology is are second skin (marsrover)

dream (virtual) must integrate in reality not go out of reality

‘Diana Slattery - the trope high' or technological highs, his resolution, high fidelity Hack Perception, hack experience, hack consciousness

How is building this technologies

McKenna

talking about us each moving into universes of our own construction, where Big Data is used to create engineers serendipities, where everything that always around is custom for us and our tastes.

best part of a trip is waking up

‘McKenna’s archaic revival’ / Mcluhan’s retrieval of values The opportunity of moving into a digital age, is not to build upon the mistakes of the industrial age, But to challenge the industrial age We can look back at reality again rather than, juist build on the artificial structures that we’ve had before

And my concern is, when we just go headlong for the high, there’s a ton of powers that be that are more than happy to serve you that high. As long as they get the Big Data that they need in order to predict or influence our upcoming behaviors.

AWE

people to experience of awe, which they defined as experiences of such perceptual expansion that people had to upgrade their mental schemata to accommodate the experience

And awe was systematically extracted form the human experience over the last 600 years. Because people in awe, people who have awe experiences, are dangerous. are unpredictable

BurningMan

You don’t have mental references for what you’re seeing. Induces that wonder, that imagination explosion

Peer-to-Peer, bazaar in the medieval sense. It was social it was commercial

Brooklyn Theater experiences - Then she Fell Create this space where you can pretty much o anywhere you want. It’s this nonlinear, interactive experience of the narrative. Connecting the dots a you experience it. and so it is this liminal space between dreams and reality, like watching a movie

VR

can technologies that allow us to essentially live in that space all the time?

the price will be we leave behind a few billions of our fellows to be in non mediated, wonderful, virtual things

We don’t have de drive to inhabit an alternative reality lees there was something we were trying to get away from.

Archetype spaces

landscapes of mind

the world of the self can be ultimately a lonely place, its not a social place

to help us cope with reality as it is rather than engage reality to make it less painful

guilt-free high can’t balance us

I’d like to create things and have meaningful engagement. But I don’t want a job. A job is an artifact of the Renaissance. People didn’t have jobs until 1300. They used to make stuff and trade. They only got jobs when it was illegal to make stuff yourself. You had to go work for a chartered corporation.

They’re still trying to figure out a story. And what story are we going to tell? And I think it;s time, stories are for children. you tell children stories at night so they go to sleep. And you try to dose it with some programming about the morals that you want them to have when the grow up. But I think we’re past stories now. We’re in something more like a game or more an adventure, or more an experiential Its a different way of taking people.

94% of human communication happens nonverbally. so what happens when you grow up in an environment where you using test to engage.

You relate through the selfie rather than through te self.

What’s technology for? To make us more human. It’s to realize our full potential, rather than what’s technology for? Well, it’s to enhance what we can sell. Or how we can extract data.

Research Notes: Virtual Drugs

Real Drugs, Virtual Reality: Meet the Psychonauts Tripping in the Rift November 23, 2015 // 09:00 AM EST

Imagine you’re soaring through a colorful, 360-degree virtual world full of obstacles, making giant leaps, jumping walls and swinging through the air with a grappling hook, Spider-Man-style. Now imagine you can actually feel the g-forces and the wind on your face as you swing around, that the movement feels so real you forget you’re in a game. Because you’ve just taken two hits of LSD.

“Just like Neo taking the Red Pill so does taking a drug change the way you perceive the world, even if that world is a computer fabricated reality,” says redditor Tardigrade1, moderator of r/RiftIntoTheMind. “Psychedelics in particular make the VR experience overwhelmingly real.”

Tardigrade1 (who asked me to use his pseudonym, Jon Connington) is a 21-year-old futurist who says his day job is in financial tech building a platform for the internet of things. He’s part of a niche group of VR psychonauts using drugs like marijuana, mushrooms, ketamine, and acid to enhance “presence,” the holy grail of virtual reality—when your brain is fooled into feeling like you’re actually there.

Mind-altering chemicals can enhance presence by speeding along the suspension of disbelief. The folks I talked to say the effect is incredibly powerful.

“I felt like I'd really been transported to another world. I actually got worried that I would forget I was in a game so I kept taking my headset off to remind myself that it wasn't real,” says gamer and redditor j0bon, who talked to me about playing Windlands on the virtual reality headset Oculus Rift, a simulation that has you swinging through the air like a superhero, while tripping on LSD.

Connington also describes playing Windlands high—after eating a very high dose of mushrooms: “Soon after dosing I had forgotten that I had the Rift on. The simulation was a grasslike landscape but I was too tripped out to actually walk around using the controller. I was sitting in my desk chair which has rubbery armrests. At some point I started to think I was a rabbit bunny thing, and started biting the rubbery armrests of my chair like a maniac thinking it was a carrot.”

Online groups like r/RiftintotheMind and r/Trees3d are full of similar anecdotes. One user posted that a bit of weed breathed new life into the surreal landscape of Greebles, a trippy VR simulation. Another describes playing a Formula 1 racing game after three tabs of LSD: “I had to remind myself that it was only a simulation. I got my senses together, and got the car back to moving. Dear lord, the sound of the engine screaming at 19K RPM almost drove me to tears.”

Connington’s first VR trip was closer to what you’d typically do after taking shrooms. After donning the Rift headset, he was sitting in a cave around a crackling campfire listening to an old man reading George Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (the series that became Game of Thrones). The simulation, Storyteller - Fireside Tales, is an immersive audio book that makes it feel like the story’s being told by someone sitting next to you.

“The echoing of the old man’s voice through the cave, the dripping of the water behind me, and the warmth of the fire in front were so intense and real that I felt like I could reach out and touch them,” Connington says.

“I had left my student life behind and become part of the ASOIAF world, feeling like Hodor could walk in at any moment.” he says. “I started to dream I was Bran, stuck in a cave somewhere North of the Wall.”

In the same way certain drugs can enhance the experience of listening to music or watching movies for some, using chemical substances to make VR more believable and powerful is bound to be something we’ll hear more about as the tech mainstreams, especially with marijuana legalization and more affordable hardware on the horizon.

Oculus Rift was the first reasonably priced VR headset, though still relatively expensive at $300-$350. A limited number of the DK1 and DK2 developer kits were available and sold out at around 175,000 total. Now the consumer version of the Rift is due to be released next year, but there are several other VR headsets available that’ll run you anywhere from $30 to $300, plus Google Cardboard for eager psychonauts on a budget.

“I expect the use of drugs along with VR to radically increase,” virtual reality expert and investor Peter Rothman told me. “The combination of psychoactive substances and particularly cannabis with VR seemingly is a match made in heaven,” he wrote in an article titled “Yes You Should Get High Before Using VR” for H+ Magazine.

In fact virtual reality and psychedelics have been intertwined from the beginning: Mark Pesce actually created the original Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) while tripping on LSD, as he describes in a 1999 interview with the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, MAPS. (This isn’t a rarity; the role of mind-expanding drugs in problem solving and early Silicon Valley inventions is well-documented. Even Steve Jobs famously described LSD as one of the most important things he did in his life.)

Usually the comparison is made by describing VR as a sort of electronic LSD, an alternate way of expanding your consciousness. During the cyberdelics era—where cyberspace, psychedelics and rave culture coalesced near the end of the 20th century—hippie counterculture icon and psychedelics advocate Tim Leary famously called VR “the LSD of the 1990s,” a comparison the tech has yet to shake, for better or worse.

We also hear a lot about VR’s therapeutic potential, including for treating drug addiction, and a 2013 study looked at whether certain compounds could augment virtual reality psychotherapy for treating PTSD and found that chemically-enhanced participants showed greater improvement in PTSD symptoms and treatments for sleep, depression, and anger expression.

But combining VR and recreational drugs is a different story, with potential benefits and dangers. It’s easy to imagine certain content causing a VERY bad trip. Picture battling monsters in outer space, only your brain thinks it’s real—that could be pretty psychologically damaging. “You can only lose your mind once—derealization and depersonalization are terrible afflictions,” Connington says. “Once it's broken it's very hard to fix.”

Connington describes playing Alien: Isolation in VR, a game set on the same industrial space station as the Alien movies, where you have to avoid a huge alien monster that’s on the loose and killing everyone. The game’s realistic AI combined with ketamine and weed made the alien feel truly alive, he says. Add visuals induced by the trip and paranoia from the weed and he began imagining threats that weren’t actually there.

“I'm not the kind of guy that gets scared that easily, but on the ket [ketamine] this game is just so insanely real and sickeningly scary that I have had flashbacks even days later. I have truly feared for my life in that game,” he says. “Even after the K trip ended I was physically shaken up and lightly traumatized for days.”

Some users said the drugs actually relieved the nausea associated with immersion, also called simulator sickness. Scientists have been studying whether cannabis can help relieve motion sickness. But almost everyone I talked to recommended avoiding dark, scary simulations and horror games.

Rothman, the investor, is taking that a step further, studying whether we can develop interfaces designed specifically for chemically enhanced users. He’s dubbed the field “stoner interface design.” He’s created some data visualizations where the color palette is specifically chosen for users under the influence, and is currently looking for funding to support further research in the area.

Lit Up is a series about heightening—and dulling—our sense of perception. Follow along here.

Topics: lit up, drugs, Virtual Reality, psychedelics, psychonauts, lsd, oculus rift, gaming, VR, windlands

Research Notes: Reverse Culture Shock

- First, returnees experienced a high level of reverse culture shock were more likely more personalization and embarrassment problems / concerns then were returnees experienced a low level of reverse culture shock.

- Second, the willingness to see a counselor for personal problems / concerns were not necessarily related to one's level of reverse culture shock.

- Reverse culture shock is the process of adjustment, and reassimilating reacculturating in one's home culture after living in a different culture for a considerable period of time.

- Clinical evidence suggests that children and youth experience a greater severity of reverse culture shock than adults

- Returnees have also been reported to experience alienation, disorientation, stress, value confusion, anger, hostility, obsessive fear, helplessness, disappointment, and discrimination

- The various returnee population is often organized in primary breadwinner (ie older) professionals / sponsorship subgroups, such as missionaries, non-governmental organization workers, federal officials, educators, volunteers, businesses and military personnel, and international students (Gerner et al. 1992)

- Sea-experienced students consist of a very diverse population brought up in highly mobile, multicultural and culturally fluid environments.

- Theories of reverse culture shock

- Reverse culture shock received scientific attention as early as 1944 when Scheutz (1944) examined the difficulties of returning military veterans. Austin and Jones (1987) identified earlier sources that indirectly targeted return issues, dates back to 1935. Culture shock itself first gained critical attention in the late 1950 and early 1960, and for the most part was studied by means of qualitative research. Lysgaard, 1955 and Oberg, 1960 and Gullahorn and Gullahorn (1963) were to describe the initial culture shock and reverse culture shock qualitative and intercultural adaptation.

- Defining reverse culture shock begins with the recognition of reverse culture shock's "parent" to build culture shock. Oberg's (1960) was early definition: "Culture shock is down beaten by the anxiety that results from losing all our familiar signs and symbols social interaction "(p 177).. P. Adler (1975) definition of culture shock is psychological more descriptive and explanatory:

- Culture shock is primarily a collection of emotional responses to the loss of perceptual reinforcements from their own culture, new cultural stimuli that have little or no meaning, and the misunderstanding of new and different experiences. It can include feelings of helplessness, irritability, and fear For cheated, defiled, hurt or ignored. (pg. 13)

- difficulties of re-adaptation and re-adjust to its own home culture after one or a stranger living in a different cultural environment.

- Of the 785 returnee students, 18% reported clinical levels of depression, only 11% of non-returning students (n = 579) reported levels of clinical depression. As for anxiety, 45% of returnees reported "problem of fear" ( p. 174), while 28% of the non-return managers reported similar levels of anxiety.

Research Questions

- What is a reverse reality shock

- How is a virtual space different from the real world?

- What are the intention of Competitions devolping VR?

- How can VR explore are full potations?

- What are the upsides of life?

- What possibilities will VR give us?

- How is the target for my project

- Who will VR change the way we interact with objects?

- What could be a reason to escape reality?

- How will VR effect us as a society?

- How will VR effect us socially?

- How addicting is VR?

- Can we live in a virtual space all the time?

- What is a reverse culture shock?

- What are the effects of a reverse culture shock?

- What is the difference between reverse culture shock and a reverse reality shock?

- What are the downsides of VR?

- What are the upsides VR?

- What are the downsides of life?

- What is the difference between everyday design & critical design?

Research Video

Writing plan Digital Age: The meaning of Technology: - Make us more human - Realize our full potential Ideology behind VR: - universes of our own construction - ultimate empathy-machine - An experiences of such perceptual expansion that people need to upgrade their mental schemata to accommodate the experience VR hacks perception, hacks experience and hacks consciousness Industrial age: Technological Drugs: - Corporate intentions - Increase sells, extract data - Guild-free high - Free to experiment Future of VR: - Escape reality - Reverse Reality Shock

Script

Recently we have experienced a tectonic shift of technology, changing almost every aspect of are lives.

Technology is meant to be an extension of are self, it helps us achieve our true potential as humans.

Imagine a technological change, which may redefine are experiences of such perception, that people need to upgrade their mental schemata to accommodate this experience.

Virtual Reality: its already here and accelerate like never seen before.

It promise us to take us to a virtual realm of endless possibilities.

A universe of our own construction, or be like the ultimate empathy-machine.

It hacks our perception, experience and our consciousness.

But it also can be used to escape reality; Like an guild-free high.

There are tons of powers that are more than happy to serve us that high.

Already a lot of corporations like Google and Samsung are investing a lot of money in to Virtual Reality

Facebook for example bought The Oculus Rift.

These corporations claim they want to change to world for the best,

but they rather want to Increase there sells or extract data from us.

As long as they get the Big Data they need, they can predict or influence our very upcoming behaviors.

By keeping us in the virtual realm for as long as possible, we become sedated,

We could lose are self and miss the chance living an proper life in the real world.

People could get mentally sick, for example be exposed to an 'Reverse Reality Shock’.

Which means living in the virtual realm for to long and have a hard time re-adjusting to the real world.

Know-longer we will feel the need and responsibility to live in the real world.

The price we pay is leaving a few billion people behind, to be in a non-mediated, wonderful, virtual world.

Research Video (First Draft)

Title: ResearchVideo: Virtual Reality

Link: [[8]]

Installation Concept

Abstract

Living in a virtual environment for to long may cause ‘Reverse Reality Shock’: which means people have a hard time re-adjusting to the real world. The easement ’Tools & Trade’ I was asked to design a Critical

Tool for people in my field. I choose to research ‘virtual reality’, because I believe virtual reality is a very powerful to for CG-artist to use. It even may have a profound effect on our society and that can be a very dangerous. Some people may choose to live weather in the virtual world instead of het real world. Why, because its more exiting and is a way to escape are problems we have to deal with in the real world. I don’t believe the real world can't be replaced by a virtual one, there are just to many things you can’t experience in a virtual realm. That’s why I want to make a installation meant as a ’therapy sessions’ for people suffering from Reverse Reality Shock. So how will it work? Often when people are suffering form a addiction, they need help changing there view.

Description

The installation views a dream like scenario. The uses is standing and puts on the VR headgears. Within the virtual space he or she is standing in a hallway.

- The point is that the uses is fiscally running on the point he is standing, what make him move straight though to hall way in the virtual space.

- By rotating his head just a little he can more to the left or the right.

- What he needs to do is escaping the long hallway by running in one of the door open doors he of she is passing by.

- Every time you get close to a door you hear voices. The voices are special moments in a persons live like: first day at school, first date, getting a diploma, fall in love, going to a festival and so on.

- Each time the uses getting really close to a open door, the door closes and the play has to move on to the next.

- In the mean time a uses walk by a person sitting in a chair with a vr head mount on its head. The uses is repeatetly running by this person, but the difference is that the person is getting older my the second.

- The installations goes on like this until the person in the chair is nothing more than a skeleton, every think turn dark and the installation ends.

What people need to realize is spending time in the virtual reailty is losing time in the real world. So if my installation can help them think differently about virtual reality and have a better view on the real world, they may want to rethink there schedule.

The real point of the installation is not to help VR addicts, it more about thinking how we deal with virtual reality. I want a discussion about the rights and wrongs about VR and how it shut be used.

Experiment: Installation (First Demo)

Try to escape a endless hallway

Link: [[9]]

Essay (First Draft)

File:LucasHartman Essay firstdraft2.pdf‎ (file size: 161 KB, MIME type: application/pdf)